Audiences, Journalists, and Forms of Capital in the Online Journalistic Field

Abstract

This study found divergence in how online journalists and student-audiences rated articles with varying popularity, as measured by audience metrics, and quality, as operationalized by winning a journalistic award. The findings revealed that while metrics and awards did not matter for young online news audiences, they were important for online journalists. But even among journalists, the importance of metrics and awards varied depending on whether the journalists were evaluating stories or their peers. For online journalists, popular stories were more newsworthy than those that were not. Awards did not influence their judgment of newsworthiness. But when evaluating the authors of the articles, online journalists rated authors of articles that won awards more favorably than authors of articles without awards. The popularity of stories did not matter in their evaluation of the authors.